Why are so many researchers moving to Qatar?
Source: https://www.elsevier.com/
Qatar is a small country that protrudes into the Persian Gulf north of Saudi Arabia. It’s home to 1.8 million people, 83 percent of whom are expats. It also happens to be the world’s most attractive research destination.
We analyzed 77 countries’ research bases to find out how many publications each country produces, how impactful those publications are, how collaborative the researchers are, and how much they move into and out of each country.
One of our findings was that many more researchers are moving to Qatar (18 percent) than out of the country (7 percent), resulting in a net researcher inflow of 11 percentage points. This suggests that Qatar is a top research destination. But what makes it so attractive?
Building research from the ground up
A few decades ago, Qatar had relatively little research capacity. But the country now invests about $100 million a year in research, supporting new institutions and faculties. The result is an increasingly supportive research environment.
For Dr. Omar El-Agnaf, Professor of Life Sciences in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad bin Khalifa University and new Acting Executive Director of Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), this was an important factor in deciding to move to Qatar. “The country and its vision were very attractive to me,” he said.
Dr. El-Agnaf is originally from Libya and he moved to Qatar a year ago. His research focuses on neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Parkinson’s disease, and has funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. For Dr. El-Agnaf, the opportunities Qatar offers far outweigh the challenges:
It’s a small country and there are some issues – for example, it can be slow to set up your lab. But things are moving, and I believe they will continue to improve over time. As a scientist, I like challenges; I get bored if everything’s easy. That’s human nature.
Some of the challenges are unique to Qatar, which in itself feeds into research. Dr. Xiaosong Ma, Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad bin Khalifa University, is originally from China and moved to Qatar in 2013 after working in the US. Her research is on distributed systems; she explores how industry can use powerful machines better, scheduling tasks to make everything run more efficiently.
“Here you can experience unique infrastructure problems that you can’t easily see in the US,” she explained. “There are lots of interesting challenges to address, and people have to get things done on smaller machines or slower deployment of hardware, or using fewer resources. Being here means we can start to address these challenges with our research.”
Despite these challenges, Qatar is developing fast; thanks to government investment, good infrastructure means researchers from around the world can find state-of-the-art facilities and institutions to work at. Read more >>